The largest and most comprehensive human lung cell atlas to date was published in the journal Nature Medicine on the 8th. By combining data from nearly 40 studies, an international research team has created the first complete lung single cell atlas, revealing the rich diversity of lung cell types, highlighting key cell differences between healthy and diseased lungs, and will become a valuable resource for lung researchers. The study found a common cellular state among Pulmonary fibrosis, cancer and COVID-19, which provides a new way to understand lung diseases and helps to identify new therapeutic targets. This study is part of the Global Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project, which aims to map every cell type in the human body to change people's understanding of health, infection, and disease. The research team successfully combined 49 lung datasets from nearly 40 independent studies into a single comprehensive graph using advanced machine learning technology. By compiling and integrating the dataset of each major single cell RNA sequencing lung study published to date, the team created the first integrated human lung cell atlas. This map covers over 2.4 million cells from 486 individuals, providing unprecedented new insights into lung biology. Professor Fabian Tess, senior author of the paper and director of the Computational biology at Helmholtz Munich Research Center in Germany, said that the reference atlas of the first human lung included data from more than 100 healthy people, revealing how individual cells change with age, gender and smoking history. The latest research enables people to see rare cell types and identify new cell states that have not been previously discovered. Although the core of the human lung cell atlas is data from healthy lungs, the team also extracted data sets from more than ten different lung diseases and projected these data into Health data to understand the disease status. The team also found that different lung diseases have a common immune cell state. In Pulmonary fibrosis, cancer and COVID-19, a subset of macrophages (an immune cell) has similar gene activity. Their common state suggests that these cells may play a similar role in the formation of lung scars in these three diseases and provide reference for potential therapeutic targets. (Outlook New Era Network)